Dark World: Into the Shadows with the Lead Investigator of the Ghost Adventures Crew (16 page)

Getting locked into Moundsville after dark was not as much fun as I thought it would be. Walking through the prison with Red Bone, whom we never expected to meet, and hearing his stories of the atrocities that happened there amped me up, and I will admit . . . I was a little scared. I was in the middle of a maximum security penitentiary where some of the most hardened criminals in the country had been stored away for safe keeping. It’s hard to keep those emotions bottled up and focus on making contact with the spirits who were there. Fear, apprehension, and nerves can influence an investigator and make the rustling of leaves sound like a human voice, so I had to force myself to keep cool and focus. Eventually I found the moral courage to say, “Game on. Let’s do this!” I felt like a warrior going to battle with evil entities who wanted to do people harm. Put a symbol on my chest and call me Count Zakula—The Banisher of Evil.

In the bowels of the prison I was alone in the boiler room where they found inmate R. D. Wall’s head (he was decapitated during a riot while using the bathroom) and a lot of other negative things happened. This is where Aaron and I heard intelligent responses, which we thought were from R. D. Wall. Then the temperature dropped and our breath became visible, so I decided it was time to be alone. I told Nick and Aaron to go upstairs, and I remained where I was. As I said, it’s not easy to put away your own emotions in such a desolate place, especially when you’re alone. But when I started getting my evidence, that’s when things changed. It was no longer an empty building where bad stuff happened. It was now occupied. It had residents who didn’t want me to be there. That in itself was enough to refocus me and—to be honest—make me angry.

“There’s a new guard in here and I’m telling you to get back in your cells!” I demanded while in one of the prison wings. “Get your heads up against those bars!” I added for good measure while rolling on my digital recorder. I was hoping I could anger the spirit of a former inmate and get him to react. It did.

Electronic Voice Phenomena

“I’ll kill you,” the angry spirit responded. It wasn’t just what he said, but how he said it. I could hear the rage in his words and the sincerity of his threat. I had invaded his space, challenged his superiority over the cell block, and taunted his manhood. So he replied the only way he could—by threatening me.

The voice was captured on my digital recorder. Deciphering EVPs accurately is an art. What we didn’t realize until after the Moundsville investigation was that there was an EVP within the EVP. When we put the recording on the waveform software with EVP experts Mark and Debbie Constantino, we saw that there was a voice within the voice. We only thought it said, “I’ll kill you,” but in fact there was more. It actually said, “Look up, I’ve gone away. Look, I’ll kill you.” At the time I was by myself, so looking back on it, I feel like the spirit was playing with me. That’s something a prisoner would have done.

Usually an EVP has a time lag since you have to rewind the recorder and listen to the result, though advances in technology by people like Gary Galka have made it possible to hear EVPs as they happen in real time. It’s this lag in time that makes EVP procedures very important.

You would think an EVP captured on two different recorders at the same time would be great evidence, and in fact that happens occasionally, but overall it’s very rare. A voice on two recorders is usually not a disembodied voice, but a human voice that came from somewhere close or was spoken by a living person in the room.

I’m very strict when it comes to EVP sessions. You have to be very cautious and take it very seriously when you hit record on that digital recorder because the last thing you want is to hear feet shuffling or your friends whispering and mistake them for spirits when you review your data. Here are my rules for a successful EVP session:

1. Identify a leader in the session and make sure that leader takes charge of the session.
   
2. Do burst EVP sessions—about one to two minutes each.
   
3. Ask five or six leading questions so you can increase your chances of getting more than one intelligent response.
   
4. Ensure everyone remains still and quiet for the duration of the session to reduce the possibility of noise contamination. Eliminate all forms of noise that could later lead to auditory paredolia (incorrectly interpreting random noises as familiar patterns).
   
5. If something happens during the session that could be later confused for a spirit noise, call it out.
   
6. If someone hears or feels a presence during the session, identify it by speaking up.
   
7. Review the recordings on the spot so you know that if you got something it happened right there and then. That way it’s fresh in everyone’s minds and you can hopefully get a feel for the emotional state of the entity for the rest of your investigation.
   

A way to avoid criticism when you capture an EVP is to analyze it on a computer using audio editing software. I always do this to examine the waveform and wavelengths. After doing this for a few years now, I’ve noticed an emerging pattern. With almost every EVP, there is an associated blip in the waveform that we call a frequency pop. It’s a small spike that precedes the disembodied voice that I feel is an additional indicator of the presence of a spirit. This frequency pop is similar to the sonic boom an aircraft creates when it passes through the sound barrier.

When it comes to EVPs, paranormal investigators like Billy Tolley of Las Vegas Paranormal Investigations of Mysterious Phenomena (Las Vegas PIMPs—catchy) are like cardiologists looking at an electrocardiogram. They’ve learned to sift through the noise and focus on what’s important and relevant to the ghost hunter. They can distinguish a disembodied voice from a cough, which makes having one at your disposal invaluable.

All paranormal investigators have an EVP that they hold dear to them like Gollum holds on to his precious ring. For many of us, it’s that one piece of evidence that either justifies what we do, validates our belief in the paranormal, or was a life-changing personal experience. For me, one EVP captured at the Goldfield Hotel in Nevada when I was still an inexperienced investigator really opened my eyes not only to the realities of EVP, but to the possibility that some spirits remember the impact we had on them just as much as we remember the impact they had on us.

Nevada is full of haunted locations. A volatile combination of corporate greed, prospector hope, and untimely violent death permeate the state’s barren terrain and treeless, yet stunning landscapes. The town of Goldfield, just south of Reno, was subject to the same get-rich-quick-or-die-trying fever as almost every other Nevada town with a mine in the nineteenth century. It was the definition of a boomtown, exploding from nothing to 35,000 people between 1902 and 1904. But eight short years later, the ore began running out and the people started running away. By 1920, the gold was almost gone and the town was reduced to just about 1,500 people. Three years later, a devastating fire wiped out twenty-seven blocks of homes and businesses.

In 1908, at the height of its popularity, the Goldfield Hotel was built on the former site of the Nevada Hotel, which had burned down in 1905. It was a grand spectacle with four stories of stone and brick and 154 rooms loaded with the latest technology— telephones, electric lights, and heated steam. The lobby was paneled with mahogany and furnished in black leather upholstery beneath gold-leaf ceilings and crystal chandeliers. The Goldfield Hotel imported chefs from Europe and boasted one of the first Otis elevators west of the Mississippi River. In the middle of nowhere, this hotel was considered the most luxurious between Chicago and San Francisco. It appealed to society’s upper crust, making it an immediate success.

George Wingfield, primary owner of the Goldfield Consolidated Mines Company, bought the hotel a short time after it was built. Wingfield was a multimillionaire by the age of thirty and became a political powerhouse in the state of Nevada, running both the Republican and Democratic parties as well as twelve banks. So it was an embarrassing situation for him when a prostitute named Elizabeth turned up pregnant, claiming the child was his. Fearful of how this scandal might affect his business affairs, Wingfield allegedly lured Elizabeth to room 109 of the hotel and chained her to a radiator. Reportedly she cried out over and over for mercy, but found none. Some say that Elizabeth died in childbirth, but others contend that Wingfield murdered her after the child was born and he had tossed the baby down an old mining shaft under the hotel. Rumors abound that Elizabeth haunts the hotel and the sound of a crying child can be heard coming from the basement.

With only five hundred permanent residents, none of whom seem to come out in the daylight, it feels like the town in
The Hills Have Eyes
. I first visited the town in 2004 when we made our documentary film and captured the infamous flying brick incident; still one of the seminal moments of my life. The short version of the story goes like this—while investigating the basement of the Goldfield Hotel, a brick lifted off the ground and flew at Aaron and me. At the same time, an old piece of wood behind the brick danced in the air and turned in strange circles that could only be described as influenced by something other than the forces of gravity. We had that footage validated by professional video analyst Slim Ritchie and PhD Victor Kwong of the UNLV physics department to prove it was no hoax. It was an incredible moment that I still consider the best piece of paranormal phenomena caught on film and one of the scariest moments of my life.

Now here’s the story you didn’t hear. After our documentary aired, paranormal investigators Mark and Debbie Constantino went into the Goldfield Hotel with Reno reporter Bill Brown, a skeptic. During multiple EVP sessions they’d gotten no responses, so with the night ending they decided to split up in the basement of the hotel. Then something happened that took the evening in a whole new direction.

With her digital recorder rolling, Debbie asked a question.

“Tell us what you want us to know.”

“Get ready to believe,” a voice responded. Debbie then asked about the flying brick incident.

“There are people here saying that you did this. Did you actually do it?” The response blew them all away. A voice, whose clarity is unmatched in digital recordings replied, “Thank you, but we’ve done it.”

It was an intelligent response to a deliberate question and the clarity of the recording was impeccable. This wasn’t a static- laden recording that you have to struggle to make out. It was clear, vocal conversation, captured at a frequency well above the normal range of human speech.

As for Bill, he would later admit, “I know what I felt, saw, and heard. I’m not sure who or what it was, but I know something, someone was there and it wasn’t always nice.” That one piece of evidence changed his outlook, which is a testament to the power of EVPs.

I really feel that the Constantino’s and myself have pushed the boundaries of EVP over the last few years and helped advanced communications between the realms. I once captured an EVP of a spirit that said, “Can I ask a question?” That incident validated that we’re making strides toward helping humans communicate with spirits and vice versa. While there is no formal classification system of EVPs that is accepted across the paranormal research field, a few groups have developed an informal classification system. Here’s how I define the different types of EVPs:

Class A—The recording has a full tone and clear message that needs no enhancement the first time you hear it. This is usually an intelligent response to a deliberate question. The recording of Jonathon Widders at Houghton Mansion is a great example of a Class A EVP.

Class B—The recording has little tone and may or may not have intelligence associated with it. The investigator has to listen closely and repeatedly to decipher the message. Clarity is not as good as Class A. Clear screams, growls, singing, groans, and humming are good examples.

Class C—The recording resembles a harsh whisper and takes time to decipher. External equipment is required to fully recognize the message and sometimes there may be only syllables with no clear words.

Class D—Poor quality recording and questionable if it’s even an EVP. An unexplained voice with undecipherable words or noises.

Splitting Up

Humans take comfort in numbers. We feel more secure in a group environment and get jittery when alone, especially in a place like Hillview Manor, where there are miles and miles of tunnels. But it’s a necessary step in the paranormal investigation process. Splitting up allows us to cover more ground, but it has other benefits as well. When we’re together we sometimes miss EVP recordings because we’re talking or focusing our cameras on each other instead of at the environment. So I always spend time alone and have Nick and Aaron do the same to tune ourselves in to the environment, but more importantly because some spirits don’t want to approach us as a group.

Keep in mind that many spirits don’t know they’re dead and are confused by the presence of three guys with cameras invading their space. They can feel intimidated, afraid, or even angry and retreat to someplace comfortable in the cracks of the building to not be seen. By splitting up and going into different parts of the location alone, we make the relationship more personal and get better results. Of course being alone also cranks the fear dial up a few thousand notches and makes self-discipline more important than ever. Controlling your emotions on an investigation isn’t so tough when your friends are around to comfort you, but alone in the dark, your only companions are your courage and character. It’s where amateurs panic. I love it.

Apparitions

Nevada has always been one of my favorite places to investigate because the history and landscape of the state are full of crushed hopes and dashed dreams. Tales abound of hearty men braving the journey from all parts to come here prospecting for a better future, few of which ended in success. The rough and tumble mining towns arguably saw more tragedy and heartbreak than any other part of the country other than the bloody Civil War battlefields of the East Coast.